I think Bubble Sort is the Wrong Way to Go

Barack Obama knows some computer science, and he is right about this! Although I couldn’t watch the video (it is on YouTube and right now I can’t access Youtube ) I read the transcript and it is hilarious.

He was asked by chief executive Eric Schmidt about “the most efficient way to sort a million 32-bit integers,” a problem in computer coding. (Obama apparently had been given the question in advance and was told it stumped McCain on his visit to Google.)

Without missing a beat, Obama said, correctly, “I think the bubble sort would be the wrong way to go.” Then he smiled.

For those who don’t know, bubble sort is a naive algorithm going through the list usually multiple times and sorting neighboring integers with O(n^2) performance.

However I’m certain computer scientists would argue over whether or not this is a valid question as this is largely hardware dependent. If he knew the provable right answer to that could probably make 10 X more than what he could as President. So good answer President!